Kid Food

By Nonna Joann • Apr 2nd, 2009 • Category: News & Views

Kid Foods Are Fake Foods

joshs-red-tongue.JPGKid food looks and tastes like food; offering little or absolutely no nutrition whatsoever. Real food is a substance eaten for nourishment. You can be assured of a picky eater, by regularly purchasing kid foods, training little taste buds to prefer fake foods.

If you want to know what kid food is, just ask for a child’s menu at any restaurant. Without a doubt you’ll see hot dogs, hamburgers, French fries, fried chicken, pizza, spaghetti, and macaroni and cheese on the menu. You can add chips, children’s cereal, soda, and cookies and other treats to the list.

Now it’s true that chicken, beef, tomato sauce, and cheese have nutritional value…if you cook them at home using whole foods. When your child eats out, most of the time the nutrition is sadly lacking.

Joshy’s mouth and tongue are red after eating a piece of birthday cake. Icing is made of sugar, trans fat, and artificial food coloring.

Today, we’ll talk about just three common ingredients found in “kid food,” saving food artificial colorings, nitrates, and other additives for another day.

First, there’s white flour, which came from the staff of life or the foundation of good nutrition, but now offers little in the way of nourishment. Whole grain flour is transformed into empty calories, when the bran is removed to make white flour. Whole grains include all three parts of the grain kernel: the bran, which is the outer layer or the fiber, the endosperm containing the complex carbohydrates, and the germ containing B and E vitamins.

White flour has been stripped of its nutrients, then, adding insult to injury, most times it’s bleached. (White flour is in most hamburger and hot dog buns, white bread, white pasta, white pizza crust, and of course most bakery products, including cookies, donuts, and cake.)

Fake foods offer fullness, without providing any nutrients. Fat gives us a full feeling. Altered fats are a regular addition to processed foods, because they’re cheap and add shelf life to products. Trans fat can’t be metabolized in the human body. In fact, trans fat has a half life of 51 days. Trans fat may be the worst, but it’s not alone. We have a new altered fat, interesterifed fats are like trans fats. They raise the blood levels of the “bad” LDL cholesterol, at the same time, they lower the “good” HDL cholesterol levels. According to the January 2007 journal Nutrition & Metabolism, interesterified fats not only negatively affect the cholesterol levels, but also negatively affect blood sugar levels! (Altered fats can be found in most bakery items: cookies, crackers, cakes, donuts, pies, pizza crust, and chips.)

Fake foods tease your taste buds with sweetness, but rob you of the enjoyment of other flavors. Today, we ingest nearly 150 pounds of sugar a year, that’s 2½ lbs a week! Sugar is seductive as it may take years before it makes you overweight, ruins your pancreas, your adrenal glands, and throws your endocrine system out of whack. Although, it will suppress your immune system up to five hours after eating something with sugar in it. Sugar is almost always included in processed foods. (Sugar is in everything from soup to nuts! It’s in cereals, ketchup, lunch-meat, soda pop, kids’ drinks, all bakery products and desserts. If it’s processed it most likely has added sugars.)

Click Here for more on Fake Foods.
For info about the free Baby Bites Ezine,
Click Here.
Listen to today’s podcast, Click Here.
For a synopsis of Baby Bites: Transforming a Picky Eater into a Healthy Eater,
Click Here.

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